


How to Fix What's Not Broken

by Kedreeva



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Character Death Fix, Dwight fixes more than just the Troubles, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Getting Together, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Troubles (Haven), Threegulls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 01:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14581533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kedreeva/pseuds/Kedreeva
Summary: Dwight helps Nathan, Audrey, and Duke remember to pause to take a breath.





	How to Fix What's Not Broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SpankedbySpike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpankedbySpike/gifts).



> Another fic from the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico charity auction last year.
> 
> Original Prompt was: Post Troubles, everyone is alive and rebuilding the town. OT3 Threegulls. The trio has been working themselves to the bone fixing things, and Dwight makes them take a night off, where they realize their feelings and have the sexy times.

 

 

            A week into salvaging the wreckage of his hometown, Nathan notices that Dwight is watching him. Not openly, not all of the time, but he is definitely watching him. At first he thinks that maybe Dwight has something to say, but when Nathan does his best to ask what is wrong without actually asking what is wrong, Dwight will not give him an answer. Nathan considers that fair enough, as he never actually asked a question, but it still annoys him.

            However, he doesn’t have enough time to dwell on it. The police station is in shambles and the citizens that are left standing need it to operate better than not at all. So he sets aside Dwight’s odd behavior and tirelessly works to repair the infrastructure of Haven, starting with the overturned desks and cracked walls and dead phone lines in the station.

            He runs his fingers over the smooth wood of the desk where he killed Duke, and when he catches Dwight staring at him from across the room, he can’t help but wonder what he would say if Dwight didn’t ask him what was wrong, either.

 

* * *

 

            Two weeks into healing the damaged community of Haven, Audrey catches Dwight giving her a thoughtful once-over. It feels like pity and she hates it. She can take a lot of things, but pity from Dwight is not one of them. She remembers what Mara said to him. She remembers the look on his face, and the hollow ring of Mara’s laughter inside of her mind.

            When she tells him to get back to work, he does, except that’s not any better because she can feel him purposely not looking at her. So, Audrey starts delivering care packages instead of working at the community center. She can’t hand out care packages twice as hard to make up for the way Dwight doesn’t look at her, but she does stay at it longer than the others. When dawn breaks, she is already picking up packages to drive around town and most days she hasn’t come back by the time the sun sets.

            She barely sleeps, although she suspects that might be a blessing considering what haunts her when she closes her eyes. She came so close to never coming back. She came so close to being just one more past life in a vicious cycle.

            But she had fought tooth and nail to be here, to come back to these people, to this town, and nothing is going to stop her from taking care of them well enough to make up for all the damage that had been done to them because of her very first past life.

 

* * *

 

            Three weeks into picking up the pieces of their ruined lives, Duke finds Dwight staring hard at him as he sifts through the rubble of the Gull. There hasn’t been any time to fix her up with everything else going on in town, and Duke has ground himself into the ground helping people just get back into their homes instead of the makeshift community center. But work stops with the sun, and he’s come here after dark every night just to move a few boards or bricks around. It’s not like he sleeps anymore anyway; he’s still too afraid he won’t open his eyes again.

            He doesn’t ask what Dwight is doing there and Dwight doesn’t offer any kind of explanation, but when Duke starts to work, Dwight helps. They pick at the skeleton of his restaurant like vultures, pulling things out into garbage and salvage piles. The kraken did a lot of damage, but four nights into the work, they find the heart of the Gull intact. Not without scars, but still in one piece, just like a lot of the town’s denizens. They set aside the bar top, and Duke thinks when he rebuilds the place for real, he’ll make sure that makes it right back into her center.

            On the fifth night, Duke turns up late to find a small crowd of townsfolk pulling pieces of his life out of the wreckage. There is music blaring from a set of speakers and someone has rigged up flood lights to work under and there are half a dozen coffee urns from people’s homes with plenty of cups to go around. Duke doesn’t cry, but he does work in a darker corner of the Gull that night, just in case.

            “You’ve done a lot for the town,” Dwight tells him when everyone is packing to go home. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest and even though he’s not looking at Duke, all of Dwight’s attention is on him like an anvil. “You need a day off. It should be tomorrow. Go find Nathan.”

            It’s not a question or an order, but Duke doesn’t particularly want to disobey. There’s still a lot to do all over town, but he knows that he won’t be useful if he’s so ragged he can’t function, and he desperately wants to be useful.

 

* * *

 

            Nathan is not at the police station the following day, nor is he at the community center visiting Audrey. Duke checks them both, but the only person at the station is a new kid Duke isn’t entirely sure actually worked there before the Wall, and she tells him Nathan has taken the day off. Seeing as that is impossible, considering how badly Nathan wants to get the town back on its feet, Duke asks the early birds at the community center, but he receives the same answer.

            Before Duke can leave, they tell him that Audrey has also taken the day off, and Duke begins to worry something went wrong. As much as he wants to drive a little too fast straight to Nathan’s front door, the roads out by Nathan’s house have yet to be completely cleared, which does not surprise Duke at all. Nathan taking care of himself last is nothing novel.

            What  _ is _ a surprise is the open front door when Duke arrives, which only serves to enhance his sense that something is wrong right up until he catches the sweet scent of pancakes and syrup.

            Audrey’s car isn’t in the driveway, but Audrey is sitting in the kitchen when Duke gets there, and he realizes the mistakes he has made a little too late. He knows he should have put two and two together, should have guessed that if both of them had taken the same day off it would be so they could be together. Duke freezes on the edge of the kitchen, not wanting to crash their date.

            But before he can bolt, Audrey kicks out the chair closest to him in an obvious invitation, and Duke notices that there’s a place setting on the table in front of it. There are three place settings, and Nathan has turned around to see what made that noise, and Duke can see he’s got the griddle out with pancakes cooking, but there is a waffle iron next to it. The iron’s light is on, and it’s too late to bail out.

            He also can’t seem to force his feet to take him any closer, acutely aware of how much talking they haven’t done since the Wall came down. Since he’d come back from the death they’d sent him to. Since Nathan had walked into Hell and come back by the grace of a demon alone. Since Audrey had walked into the Armory with her head held high and emerged on the other side the savior of the world with all of her battle scars on the inside where no one can see them.

            Duke sees them. He sees them in the way she drops his gaze and then forces herself to look at him again. He sees Nathan’s scars, just as deep and ugly, in the guilty way that Nathan sets the finished waffle in front of him a moment later.

            And Duke opens his mouth to expose his own scars, to say that he sees everyone he’s killed when he sleeps, and that Nathan  _ killed _ him, and that Audrey  _ watched _ , and that he’d let them do it again, because they  _ had to _ or else he would have killed more people, or else the whole world would have ended eventually.

            But what comes out of his mouth is: “You said  _ we _ .”

            He sees the way they both stiffen and he knows there’s no way they don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. He knows that of everything sitting in the empty space between them, those three words are the loudest.

            “You said  _ we _ love you,” he says again, soft enough to sound like all the broken pieces he’s been in since she said it.

            Nathan takes his seat slowly and picks up the small tub of butter. “So?” he says, as he scrapes his knife through the spread.

            “I meant what I said,” Audrey adds, because she’s always been the best at understanding him.

            Nathan watches him for a beat and then says: “Me, too.”

            “You meant what you said?” Duke asks. He hasn’t forgotten that part, either. He hasn’t forgotten a single word of the things Nathan told him when he thought he’d never see him again, and he’s had no idea if it was true or if Nathan had wanted to make it easier to let go. Make it easier to feel better about having done it.

            “And what she said,” Nathan admits. He looks up and meets Duke’s eyes. “We do love you.”

            “You’ve been avoiding me,” Duke says, even though he knows that’s not fair.

            “You know where we’ve been,” Nathan says, and that’s not fair either.

            “We thought you might need space, if you didn’t feel the same,” Audrey says, and that’s the least fair of all. “But you’re here now.”

            Duke still hasn’t taken a seat, and Nathan is pouring syrup on his pancakes like nothing world-shaking is happening and Audrey’s halfway through her breakfast, and Duke says: “Dwight made me take a day off.”

            Audrey’s laugh sounds brittle, still uncertain, and she shares a look with Nathan before answering. “Us too. He told us to expect company.”

            And there it is, the other shoe Duke’s been waiting for, so he nods. “You didn’t know I was coming.”

            “Who else would it be?” Nathan asks. His tone makes Duke want to get defensive, but he doesn’t fire back because the words are exactly what he has needed to hear. They had not been expecting just company, they had been expecting  _ him _ . He glances down at the waffle and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to eat it with his heart lodged in his throat.

            “Do you still mean it?” It sounds every bit as small and scared as he’s ever tried not to be but he can’t take it back now.

            Nathan actually meets his eyes, and Duke can see all of the years they’ve had and all of the years they lost and all of the years Nathan thought he’d taken written in every line of his face. When Nathan nods, Duke feels like he’s been shattered apart and put back together at the same time. He doesn’t recognize the sound he makes as he passes right by the chair and the waffle and even Audrey to get to where Nathan sits.

            Nathan stands up as if he thinks Duke might throw a punch, but he doesn’t resist or fight back when Duke fists a hand into his shirt and pulls him into a kiss. It takes Nathan a moment to relax from fight or flight, to respond in the spirit of the third f and kiss Duke back. He kisses like he’s been thinking about it for years, like he’ll never get another chance, like the only thing that matters is that Duke knows he means it.

            Breathless and aching, Duke pulls back a moment later, dizzy with the realization that he might actually get to have this. He presses his forehead to Nathan’s, eyes still closed, an mumbles: “I love you, too. Both of you.”

            Audrey’s fingertips touch his back and he shifts to let her into the circle. She puts her head on his shoulder and twines her fingers with Nathan’s and smiles. “You know, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t eat breakfast in bed.”

            “We can eat down here,” Duke says, not wanting to ruin the breakfast. They made him waffles, and he feels another wash of warmth as he realizes they really were waiting for  _ him _ . “Everything’s already set up.”

            Nathan’s laugh is more of a rumble. “She’s not talking about food, Duke.”

            Duke looks at the hand she extends to him, and thinks  _ oh _ the second before he takes it and lets her lead them both toward the bedroom. He tells himself he’ll have to thank Dwight in the morning, and that’s the last thought he spares anything that isn’t Nathan or Audrey for the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

            Lizzy looks up as her dad comes in, and she furrows her brow as she watches him toss his coat over a chair and flop down on the couch beside her. “Uh?” she asks.

            “Pick a movie,” he says, which doesn’t answer her question at all.

            “Don’t you have work?” she asks. He’d been working himself to the bone helping out Chief Wuornos at the station and helping people at the community center and working on construction all over town. Most days he left at dawn and came back at dusk, and she packed him a lunch and made him eat dinner before he crashed.

            He stares into the dark television for a few seconds before he smiles. “Not today,” he says. “I made those three idiots take a day off to figure themselves out.”

            There were only three idiots he could possibly mean, the three people he came home and consistently groaned about. She had never seen a soap opera, but she felt like she understood the concept just from hearing about them. “Do you think they will?”

            Her dad reaches for the remote control. “They’d better,” he says. “No one feels right taking a break as long as they keep going, and they were so busy avoiding each other I was afraid they’d go forever. I made them stop for a little so  _ we _ can stop and catch our breath.”

            She smiles and gets up to fetch a DVD, glad to have her dad to herself for a day. “They’d be lost without you,” she tells him.


End file.
